There is no consumer expressway to your product or service. The long and winding road of commerce is traffic-jammed with questions, obstacles, competitors, and a morass of messaging that make decision-making more complex than ever. It’s your job to tread this path right alongside your buyer, planting your marketing road signs in the exact right places. But where? And how do you compel your audience to take the exit and actually make the purchase? If you’re struggling to get a handle on your potential buyers, you need a map.
The buyer journey is constantly evolving. The entire process of making a purchase has completely flipped. Buyers are savvier, more connected, and more skeptical than ever before. In many cases, they’re able to become experts on your products before ever interfacing with you – and it’s thanks to the availability of research and consensus of opinion at their fingertips (whether valid or not). The power now lies with the consumer and their spheres of influence. This shift in behavior makes it more essential than ever to properly map your buyer journeys. Doing so will help drive alignment across all marketing and sales efforts, and make them more effective. Fair warning, this will take time. Going through the process, however, will gain you powerful insights into your buyer’s decision-making process and the questions they have along their journey. From this level of understanding, you can shape more effective marketing messages and identify at which touchpoints they need to see those messages. It truly is powerful.
Mapping: The Discovery
To understand your audience you need to survey it. Not with actual surveys (though that wouldn’t hurt), but as an explorer would chart a new land, carefully mapping every discovery and path. By studying your audience’s buying process from start to finish, you’ll begin to notice trends and what is going on in their minds at each stage, allowing you to capitalize on small moments you may have missed if you simply trusted your assumptions. We have a saying around the office, “Nothing important happens in the office.” We use it so much, we’ve even created an acronym for it: NIHITO. This is a reminder that you have to get out and actually talk, face-to-face, with your customers, potential buyers, and even those who may not yet know who you are. From these “NIHITO visits” you can begin to understand what your audience looks like, using these insights to create buyer personas. These personas will become the basis for your marketing map.
Mapping: The 4 Quadrants
Just like any map orients around four compass points, your buyer process map has four critical components you need to know inside and out:
- Identify and validate their process by learning how many phases they go through as they move toward the purchase. Phases might range from “outside the market” to “problem emerges” to “research,” and finally to “purchase.” Find the phases specific to your buyer.
- Understand and interpret buyer actions within each of these phases. At what point during the research phase does your audience reach out to their spheres of influence for outside opinions? What messaging could you deliver that would be most effective in that moment?
- Identify the questions your buyer might ask themselves within each phase. These should be the questions of who will ultimately be calling the shots on the actual purchase (this may be different from the person doing the initial research). Your marketing content and messaging should meet their needs and answer their questions at each phase.
- Identify when your buyer has moved from one phase to the next. Do they have a new set of needs that require a new set of answers or content to help keep them progressing through the phases? Understand what triggers each move to the next phase so you can support their journey.
Share The Map Company Wide
Once you’ve done the research and consolidated your findings into your buyer map, share it across all company stakeholders, from sales to product development and even the executive team. This will help align the company around one central vision and set of goals. And as a product marketer, you’ll produce stronger campaigns that resonate with your audience and help turn mere lookers into buyers.